New owners of Napster, Roxio, have given the old fileshare program an overhaul to make it legal and are planning to release “Napster 2” sometime around Christmas.
Unlike its predecessor, however, you now have to pay for the service. They are undecided whether to have a subscription or whether to have a pay-per-track system at this time, but whatever happens you will have to pay for the privelidge.
What do you downloaders think? Is it a good idea or are you going to use illegal (but free!) fileshare programs such as Kazaa and Xolox?
IANAD(ownloader), but I wouldn’t mind paying to download music if:
Once I download a song or songs, I should be to do with it as I please. Just like when I buy a CD. If I want to make a 100 mix CD’s and have the same song on a dozen or more of them, I should be able to do so.
They should make available a wider range of material that wouldn’t normally be available in CD form. There’s plenty of “one hit wonder” material that will never see the digital light of day that I’m sure a few thousand people would like to get their hands on. If I buy a couple of songs that were minor hits, but not available on CD, at least the artist would get a few cents instead on nothing. How much material is wasting away in record company vaults not making a single penny?
If entire albums are to be available then all cover art, disc labels, and lyrics should be available as well.
Ultimately, the same could apply to video on demand.
Ask the record number of people who bought The Eminem Show and Kid A, even though both albums were available on P2P services for weeks before their official release. Or the customers of eMusic, iTunes, and other similar services that already exist.
As to the OP, I don’t really see the point of remaking Napster. It won’t be the same at all if there’s centralized billing; indeed, a paying customer will expect much better quality, reliability, and speed than Napster ever offered. But if they stick with the MP3 format, I think it’ll do better than services like BuyMusic and iTunes that use proprietary formats.
To the O/P, whats happened to change the status of Napster? I remember in September/October of last year I was doing some research for a speech I had to do on Napstar, and it said that even with a fee and with a 99% success rate of stopping illegal music file transfers that the high court still ruled in favour of the RIAA and stopped the Bertelsmann group from starting up Napster again. Do you have a cite to the story?
Subscriptions to ANYTHING sucks. It should always be pay per service rendered.
That’s why nobody used email to fax. The only online services are by subscription, cutting out all small users. They still have to go to the quickymart or Kinkos to fax out that one item a month.
Yet the need is there. Come on guys- take my money and do your thing, but don’t try to suck me into a subscription.
Depends. If they had a good range of music, a low subscription rate and I got broadband I’d do it. They’d also have to make sure there were no drop-outs and make the file searching system a lot better. I expect something for my money.
By the way, for those that don’t know, there’s absolutely zero in common between the previous Napster and the new Napster. No similar employees, no similar technology, no nothing. it’s just a name that Roxio bought.
Many here know my strong feelings about intellectual property rights. So perhaps it may come as a surprise that I did a lot of business with Napster when they were in business. Was lucky enough that they payed all our bills before croaking. Met with a lot of their senior management, including their final CEO. They switched out senior managers left and right by the way, especially near the end.
Also interesting of note was that a lot of their senior managers weren’t experts in music or technology or markets; they were experts in law, as they rightly realized that legal fighting was their real chore.
Also interesting: Their headquarters didn’t say “Napster”, and they didn’t publish the address anywhere. They kept the front door locked, and you had to knock and have someone let you in. See, they had a lot of bomb threats and such, and in fact, during major press releases, they even hired security guards to patrol in front of the place. They also were regularly hit with massive DOS attacks and had lots of other security breaches.
Anyway, I don’t think the Roxio effort will go very far. The existing players (BuyMusic and iTunes) have way too much clout and credibility. The Napster name won’t go too far by itself.